


Other Poison Devils

by songlin



Series: Powerful, Beautiful and Without Regret [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Angst, Biting, Blood Drinking, Gen, Unhealthy Relationships, Vampires, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-10
Packaged: 2017-11-03 09:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is where it starts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the hole is where the heart is

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This decade, she is called Anthea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theme: Marilyn Manson, If I Was Your Vampire

This decade, she is called Anthea.

It’s her real name, as a matter of fact, the one her parents gave her in the days when the Nazarene carpenter walked the Earth. It was a holy name, dedicated to the goddess of marriage and childbirth. Parents hoped that such a name would honor the deity and inspire her to bless young women with husbands, healthy sons and easy, painless labors, so there were many Antheas then.

She has been Marigold and Rosaline and Dahlia, Ivy and Elanor and Marguerite. There have been others, countless others, but she always comes back to Anthea in the end.

When she met Mycroft she was Lilliana, and she liked to wear her hair up and her corset tight. The nineteenth century was good for her. Routine and schedule drive her, keep her in order. Some call it restriction; she prefers to think of it as stability. Structure.

Mycroft was like a poorly-kept monument when she found him, corpulent and lazy, molded by the short-sightedness of the British Empire into a naked thirst for immediate gratification. Anthea peered past the pettiness, delved into the depths of him and saw a foundation that was strong.

“It’s like the core of a dormant volcano,” she said to him, when she was pricking at his wrists (where the fat was starting to melt away) with her long, sharp nails and licking up the rivulets of blood.

He was no longer young when she decided he was ready, but neither was he old.  His hair was starting to thin, but he was healthy, strong, and most importantly, ambitious.

Mycroft was not her first. He was, however, her first in a long time, and she almost fainted when _he_ starts drinking from _her,_ it felt that good. She knew it was almost over when she felt his heart racing against her chest, beating out the rhythm of war drums inside his ribcage, and drew away. It was Mycroft Holmes’s time to die.

He fell back on the sofa with a sigh. She smiled and ran her tongue up one long, white finger, where there was still a drop of Mycroft’s blood from five minutes ago, when he was human.

“It is quite unpleasant,” she said with a little grimace, “but necessary. I shall come to check on you soon, darling.”

She didn’t.

Anthea lounged on her bed upstairs, sketching in her notebook, wrinkling her nose at the choking, gurgling and retching sounds from downstairs that marked Mycroft Holmes’s death and resurrection. She had forgotten how _disgusting_ it was, the dying part. She was sure it hadn’t been so repulsive for _her_.

At sunset, silence fell. Anthea smiled and waited.

_Not long now._

There were footsteps, slow and careful, up the stairs towards her room. She licked her lips. The door swung open.

“I find my suit in a frankly appalling state,” Mycroft said, frowning at his waistcoat. “You must send for a replacement.”

She grinned. “Yes, sir.”


	2. isolate and save you from yourself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft has only ever let one person drink from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theme: A Perfect Circle, Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums

_this is where it starts_

Mycroft has only ever let one person drink from him.

Sherlock knew something was wrong with his brother immediately. Mycroft visited him one evening two weeks after he’d Changed, as they called it in those days. He dropped by with crime scene photographs from the Whitechapel Killer, which Sherlock seized straightaway.

He looked at them briefly, tossed them onto his desk and sighed. “The Ripper is dead,” he said. “No more than an hour after this woman died, unless I miss my mark. Now that passel of imbeciles at Scotland Yard will never track her down.”

“Hmm. ‘Her’?” Mycroft took a seat in one of the large plush chairs.

Sherlock waved a dismissive hand and flopped backwards into the chair across from Mycroft. “I have told you before, Mycroft, and I shall--”

He stopped dead, squinting at his brother’s face. Mycroft arched an eyebrow. Sherlock launched himself back out of his chair and towards his brother, looming over him and planting his hands on both arms of the chair.

“What have you done, Mycroft?” he demanded.

Mycroft met his gaze unflinchingly. “Lead me through your evidence and elaborate upon your conclusions.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “You have not breathed except before speaking since entering the room,” he said at last. His fingers circle Mycroft’s wrist. “You have no pulse. You have been outside six times in the past two days alone, three times your average, but never during the day.”

Mycroft nodded. “Good. Is that the extent?”

“This is impossible,” Sherlock breathed.

“Plainly it is not. I have presented you with the evidence; it is yours to interpret.”

Sherlock’s lips parted. His eyes widened. He jerked away, clutching the hand that was taking his brother’s pulse.

“When you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” he said very quickly, as if reciting. “The _impossible.”_

“I am here,” said Mycroft patiently. “The facts are apparent.”

“It is my perception, then,” said Sherlock, breathing hard.

Mycroft shook his head and chuckled. Sherlock gave a shout and clapped a hand over his mouth. Mycroft scowled. His fangs have shown themselves without permission. He rubbed a hand over his mouth.

“Apologies. I did not mean to... _startle_ you.”

“Leave,” Sherlock ordered. “Leave _now.”_

Snarling, Mycroft obeyed, only because he knew that to stay would have been an exercise in futility. He left Sherlock there in his dingy flat paid for with his meager violinist’s salary, shaking as his carefully constructed world of order and logic was flooding in around him.

He did not speak to his brother again for four years.

 

_this is where it will end_

It was November of 1895 when he found him. Half the Diogenes Club had Changed by then, and it was via their channels that he learned of a tall, dark-haired man who’d been frequenting their clubs and hunting grounds, stalking their homes. He had appeared in a variety of disguises, but Mycroft knew how to look.

Some of them had tasted him. This was unacceptable. Punishments were meted out accordingly.

It did not take Mycroft long to find him after that. He spent a week going round the clubs and opium dens and tenement houses his kind owned, discreetly asking after the thin man with curly hair. His search ended in a brothel in Whitechapel, drugged and locked in a basement room. The procuress had heard Mr. Holmes was looking for his brother, and thought she would help. Mycroft, though pleased to have found Sherlock again, was unhappy with her methods, and dealt with her first, as circumstances merited.

When he had washed the blood off his face, he twisted the knob off the door and violently elbowed it open. Within, he found his brother sprawled on a ratty sofa, dressed in a torn pair of trousers and a shirt stained with dried blood. He was barely conscious enough to turn his head at the crash of wood.

“Oh, Sherlock,” Mycroft sighed. Grimacing, he knelt on the floor by the sofa. “You foolish man.”

“It’s true,” Sherlock whispered, eyes wide. “It _is,_ all of it and so much more. I--I did not know what to do. How to think. I had to--learn.”

Mycroft patted his arm. “Yes, Sherlock. Shall I take you home?”

Sherlock bit his lip. He nodded.

Sherlock slept through the cab ride back to Mycroft’s home and only just regained consciousness enough to be led up the stairs.

“You must not let me die,” he insisted, as Mycroft laid him across the bed in his spare room. _“I cannot die yet.”_

Mycroft smiled and petted Sherlock’s hair. He jerked his head away, and Mycroft’s expression soured.

“You shan’t.”

“But there is so much I must know and not enough time to know it. I must know it all, but if I--there would be many hours of being _bored,_ so terribly unoccupied that my mind would rebel at the stagnation and devour itself whole, and if I lived forever there would be so many such times I cannot bear--”

“Hush,” Mycroft soothed. “We shall speak tomorrow.”

Sherlock fell quickly into a deep, fitful sleep. Mycroft took the opportunity to roll up his shirtsleeve, bite his wrist, and hold it gently to Sherlock’s lips.

He did not wake, heart pounding, until Mycroft was pulling his arm away with a murmured apology.

Mycroft did not stay either.

 

_safe from pain and truth and choice and other poison devils_

Sherlock did not wake into death with composure as Mycroft did. He burst into Mycroft’s office still wearing the bloody, filthy clothes he had been wearing in the basement of the brothel, seizes Mycroft by the throat and slams him back into the wall.

“I should kill you,” he snarled. “I should. I could, now.”

Mycroft’s face twisted. “You have already, once, when you took yourself away. Do not murder me again, Sherlock.”

Sherlock was momentarily stunned. His face froze with shock, trembled, melted into contempt.

“Goodbye, Mycroft.”

He dropped Mycroft there and stalked out of the room.

 

_I’ll be the one to protect you from your enemies and your choices: they’re one and the same_

Mycroft did not let himself lose Sherlock again. His network expanded, spread, and once Sherlock had changed he became easier to track. The newborns always were, before they learned. Sherlock did learn, and quickly, but so did Mycroft. They stayed that way for many years, a cat-and-mouse game across the globe, always on the lookout.

Then the eighties came, and suddenly they were living in the open. They were sanguinarians, lycanthropes, not monsters, and they were more or less accepted, so long as they behaved. There were medications in the works to control them, calm them. Mycroft, after roundly congratulating himself on a job well done, Mycroft set himself to the task of once again doing what was best for his brother.

It was a seedy bathhouse rather than a brothel this time, and cocaine rather than laudanum, but otherwise things went largely the same. Sherlock could fight better, but Mycroft won in the end.

“Always so belligerent,” he sighed. “Do try to sympathize, Sherlock. I’m trying to _help_ you.”

“Let me go,” he growled, struggling in Mycroft’s grip.

“You have to understand you cannot live this way anymore. We are being accepted into the mainstream, and it cannot happen if some of us are still eating coke fiends in gay bars.”

“Let me _go.”_

“Not until you _listen.”_

Sherlock struggled a bit more, for show, really, then stilled, body sagging between Mycroft and the wall. “Why?” he said, so quietly only Mycroft could hear him. “Why did you leave me to this? You knew what would become of me, I _told_ you. I’ve too much time and nothing to do with it.”

Mycroft smiled ruefully. “So many years and you still haven’t learned.” He dropped his head onto Sherlock’s shoulder briefly, raised it again, and spoke into Sherlock’s ear, narrowing his focus onto the words he was saying. “I couldn’t let a tool so sharp and delicate rust away. _Look_ at you now, Sherlock. It’s been a century and you’re more brilliant than ever. You just require...use. I can help."

Sherlock sighed, long and deep.

“You have to _let_ me, Sherlock.”

He shut his eyes.

“Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll... _behave.”_

He spat the word like a curse, but it was enough to satisfy Mycroft. He turned him round to face him, took his face in both hands, and pressed his lips to Sherlock’s head. It was more a blessing than a kiss. When he drew away and saw the revulsion and defeat in Sherlock’s eyes, he chalked it down to the cocaine.

“Thank you, brother. You will never know what this means to me.”

“I do,” Sherlock whispered. “I know.”


End file.
